Asparagus, once a beacon of California springtime, used to cover 36,000 acres of farmland in the state. Today, only 3,000 acres remain. What's to blame? In a Los Angeles Times story, reporter Cindy Carcamo explains that asparagus is a labor-intensive crop, originating as a crown underneath the earth.
"On a warm day, you can have someone harvesting asparagus in the morning and, by the afternoon, they may have to go back and do another pass because another spear has grown," she says. Commercial growers typically hold off harvesting the vegetables until they're nine inches long but if they wait too long, the spears will be tough.
Farmers understand the plant is ready to go dormant when it starts producing thinner spears. There is a misconception that these are baby spears, Carcamo says, and that the plant is tired of producing.
The asparagus harvest hasn't been mechanized and some farms, like Zuckerman Family Farms in Stockton, stopped bringing asparagus to farmers markets. They had a hard time competing with imports from Peru and Mexico, where regulations are laxer and the minimum wage is much lower than in California.